Unreal Tournament III: Titan Pack Review

Behemoths, Betrayal and big maps add up to Unreal fun.

By now, you've put Akasha six feet under, mastered Warfare along with the other multiplayer modes and have pelvic thrusted your way across every map from Arsenal to Torlan. Aside from random mods that you track down off the web, you're probably looking for a challenge or some kind of additional play to make you pick up your impact hammer and flak cannon for a multi-kill or two. Fortunately, you're in luck. Epic Games and Midway Games recently released the Unreal Tournament III: Titan Pack, an expansion that provides more than a simple addition of maps or mutators. Instead, you're getting a large amount of content that will keep you gibbing your opponents for a while to come.

The first notable feature is the Titan mutator, which really puts a new spin on just about every single game type that it can be included in. When a player joins a match with the Titan mutator enabled, they'll see a small meter at the bottom right of the screen. Performing different tasks, such as eliminating vehicles, killing opponents, or returning flags, will fill your meter with varying score amounts. Once you've earned twenty points towards your titan meter, you can trigger your transformation into a titan, growing to fifteen feet, gaining 400 points of health and shielding and also snagging completely different weapons.

Titans are allowed to perform a large ground pound that tosses enemies off their feet and at times completely off ledges, which will instantly add to your kill count. They'll also receive homing rockets as well as shock rifle charges, which will slowly regenerate as they're fired. Players that are good at using the Titan and manage to refill their Titan meter once again can further transform into a Behemoth. While they keep the same weaponry, their ground pound radius is expanded, the character grows to thirty feet and they gain 800 points of shields and health. Needless to say, watching these gigantic figures come lumbering down at you can be a daunting prospect and if you take one down, they'll explode with a nuclear explosion (similar to that of a localized Redeemer strike), allowing them to take out enemies and friends alike in the blast radius.

While the inclusion of these beasts would seem to throw off the balance of the game significantly, Epic spent a long time making sure that there were some downsides to turning into these brutal tanks. First of all, your speed is significantly decreased, leaving you open to attack from all sides without quickly dodging or escaping incoming fire. Secondly, it's impossible for Titans or Behemoths to pick up power-ups or weapons, or drive vehicles. They also can't accomplish game mode objectives, so you won't be able to capture nodes in Warfare or pick up the flag during CTF matches. Furthermore, while Behemoths gain additional health and strength, their life span is limited to 30 seconds before they explode; Titans, by contrast, remain standing as long as they have health.

As a result, you'll find that turning into a Titan is much more of a support role or base defense position (in Warfare mode) than anything else and if you manage to get coordinated with your teammates, you can create a nearly unstoppable force for your team. In these situations, it's possible for an organized team or clan to dominate, skewing play as they support their Titans with Darkwalkers and other vehicles, but for the most part, the Titan adds a ton of strategy to gameplay as you figure out the best time to transform and then instantly try to hold down the fort as long as you can. As a minor aside, I do wish that there was a game mode that revolved around the Titan, because it's pretty obvious that a "King of the Hill" or "Last Titan Standing" element is tailor-made for these giants on the battlefield.

Apart from the Titan Mutator, players can partake in one of two new gameplay modes, each of which expands on the replayability of the title. The first one is Greed, which is very similar to CTF, with the exception that when a player dies, they drop a skull that's worth one point. Collect five skulls and you'll receive a gold skull, while collecting twenty skulls equals a red skull that also acts as a damage amplifier. Further collecting ten additional skulls boosts the time that the damage amplifier is in effect, which, of course, plays into the main purpose of the game: is it worth it to you to constantly attempt to blast your enemies, farming their skulls and potentially maintaining your damage boosts, or is it more intelligent to try to score with the collection you currently have?

By bringing their collected amount of skulls to a repository in the enemy base, a player is teleported back to their team's base and starts over again until the point threshold is met. Greed is an extremely fun gameplay mode to launch into, especially if the Titan mutator has been turned on, as using supporting giants to aid a faster soldier that collects skulls can lead to pitched battles around enemy bases that can be extremely tense for both sides. For example, during one fight, I witnessed a rival with more than one hundred skulls that he'd meticulously saved by scavenging the battlefield. However, every single time that he'd try to make it to our base, we'd shatter his defenses and collect the bounty on his head, only to have his teammates do the same to us. It was only with one or two of our side going Behemoth that we were able to score any points at all during that match.

Don't lose your head.

The other mode is Betrayal, which is one of the most engaging gameplay modes I've checked out in a while, primarily because of how devious and cutthroat the game is. Players are provided with an instagib shock rifle, and are given free reign to blast opposing players for points. The better a player is doing within a match (such as killing other players without dying and gaining a lead over other players), the higher the point value over your head grows. Here's where things get interesting: every shot that you make adds to your points as well as a bank of points for your team. At any point, you have the option to betray your team by shooting them in the back, claiming the banked points and marking you as a rogue agent for thirty seconds. During this time, former teammates can blast you and earn retribution bonus points, but if you can avoid this fate, you can deny them points before being randomly assigned to another team and proceeding through the rest of a match. Only one person can win this mode, however, so you'll need to balance when you decide to stab your teammates in the back and when you go hunting for other players. It's fast paced, it relies on accurate shots to take out opponents and it's definitely a burst of adrenaline when you see a teammate turn on you.